March 23, 2004

The World Live Web

Dave Sifry talks about Technorati tracking the "world live web". He also calls it a "search engine for conversations".

Some thoughts:

  • I wonder if the brand will limit its market potential. It's kind of a tongue-twister and hard-to-spell domain. It's also inherently geeky. That'll appeal to the techies and the bloggers -- but will it appeal to the mainstream 'Net user? Can Technorati cross the chasm?

  • And if it really is "conversations" that Technorati's about, then ultimately it needs to be a search engine not only for just-posted blog entries, but also for just-posted conversations going on in mailing lists, IRC sessions, chat rooms, and open IM sessions. I suspect there are far more "live" conversations going on there at anyone time than the number of people submitting a new blog entry or comment to a blog at any one time. I'd love to see an army of IRC bots go out and monitor open IRC chats, and then you could have technorati alert you to when an interesting chat is going on on a subject you're interested in, in real time. Perhaps not just the subject, but the participants as well: alert me when Mitch Kapor is talking about Chandler in an OSAF chat session in IRC....

  • As high bandwidth continues to expand into the market, prosumer-generated content will begin to take advantage of that higher bandwidth. There are already audio blogs, photo blogs, and nascent video blogs. Eventually there will be lots of video and audio blogs. How will Technorati be able to find content in these formats? Or will technorati be relagated to text only, and miss out on helping users find the very interesting, highly newsworthy (imagine: 5-minutes-old camcorder footage of some major world news event/incident) content?

more later...

Posted by brian at 08:50 AM | Comments (2)

Glaser's Question to Jobs

[PC Forum] Rob Glaser on Steve Jobs, Apple, and the proprietary iPod (where only tunes bought from iTunes Music Store can be loaded onto the iPod): "What the heck is going on? I bought an iPod and I can only shop in one store? What is this, the Soviet Union!??"

Posted by brian at 08:11 AM
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